The British class system, then, informs the novel, making it a peculiarly British dissection of power structures. Coupled with his physical or evolutionary disadvantage (his extreme myopia and reliance on glasses) and he was doomed from the start. He was always destined to be the scapegoat because the English class system dictated it. As Sutherland argues, his use of phrases like ‘the runs’ instead of, say, ‘an upset tummy’ are subtle ways in which Golding, without hammering home Piggy’s origins, reveal his status to the reader. The island on which the boys are stranded becomes like the island of Great Britain which they left. The message of Lord of the Flies, then, is that if you remove these schoolchildren from Britain, the British class system will still reassert itself as they construct their own stratified ‘society’. Jack has all of the confidence of someone born into privilege and with an almost innate sense of their right to lord it over everyone else.
Ralph, therefore, is riddled with self-doubt about his middling position in English society: the Jacks of the world are above him and the Piggies below him.
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